Ronda Evans, mother of Gary Tinsley Jr. holds her son's diploma from the University of Minnesota. Tinsley Jr., a linebacker for the Golden Gophers, was found dead in his apartment on April 6. The university awarded his diploma posthumously.

A poster of Gary Tinsley Jr. that his family has kept. Tinsley Jr., a linebacker for the University of Minnesota, was found dead in his apartment on April 6.

Peace comes in different ways these days to Ronda Evans.

Sometimes she finds it in a random text message, or from a video clip that she’s watched more times than she can count. Others, it comes by looking out the window in her living room and clutching the college diploma that her son, former Minnesota linebacker Gary Tinsley Jr., was never given the chance to hold.

When Tinsley, a First Coast graduate, went to sleep early on the morning of April 6, it was supposed to be the beginning of the best stretch of his life. He was the first person in his family to earn a college degree, and after that, potentially the first to play in the NFL. If football didn’t work out, his parents say Tinsley would’ve done something in the fashion industry. He loved shoes and clothes as much as he did filming friends and family on his MacBook and then posting the clips to Facebook.

But after hanging up the phone with a friend shortly after 3:30 a.m., Tinsley, 22, closed his eyes and went to bed. Sometime after that, his heart stopped beating.

The medical examiner in Hennepin (Minn.) County said that Tinsley, a 6-foot-1, 231-pound linebacker in the best physical condition of his life, died of cardiomegaly, an enlarged heart. It never showed up on any medical report.

Gary Tinsley didn’t blend in. That was never his style. When Tinsley began playing baseball as a child, Gary Sr. said he never once had to ask him to put his uniform on; Tinsley would be dressed and ready to go at 3 p.m. for a game at 7 that night.

“He just wanted somebody to see him in that uniform,” his father said.

When baseball segued into football, Tinsley was visible because of an attitude he carried with him throughout his playing career. His parents said that Tinsley always looked at competitive sports with a chip on his shoulder, probably because it motivated him to play as if his position was always at stake. He didn’t want to lose, whether it be in one-on-one drills or an argument around the house with his sister, Najai Tinsley.

Gary Sr. recalled his son hurting his right arm during a game one day. Playing center, he couldn’t properly snap the ball with a hurt arm so the coach went to pull him out of the game. Tinsley wouldn’t have it. He started using his left hand to snap the ball and kept on playing.

“His coach told me that he could hike better with his left hand than half of the team could play with their right hands,” Gary Sr. said.

LONG WAY FROM HOME

Tinsley went to Raines his freshman year, but Evans said she let him transfer to First Coast because of a better opportunity and less of a chance of landing in trouble. His closest friends were at First Coast, and most of those played football for the Buccaneers. Tinsley was more than just football, though. His outfits were loud. He had dozens and dozens of shoes that he wore. Tinsley was charming and funny. When the Mr. Ugly contest rolled around, Tinsley used friend and former Florida State running back Jermaine Thomas as a punchline.

“He’s the only one of my friends who could pull something off like that,” said Avis Commack, a safety at Akron, who became friends with Tinsley in middle school.

Tinsley and First Coast won three consecutive district titles and played a nationally televised game in 2007 against Berkeley (Moncks Corner, S.C.) on ESPN. Buccaneers coach Marty Lee said that ’07 team laid the groundwork for the future of the program, which culminated with First Coast reaching the Class 7A state championship game in 2011.

A natural linebacker, Tinsley played out of position on the defensive line in high school, amassing 42 sacks over his junior and senior seasons. He had five sacks in the Florida Athletic Coaches Association North-South game in 2007 and won most outstanding player honors.

“He knew he was capable of anything but he always felt like the underdog, like he had to pull himself up to the top for people to see,” Evans said. “That was his bitter thing. He’d always call and be like, ‘Mom, these people here don’t know what I can do.’ He always had to talk his way through it. And when he’d get on top that was the happiest moment for him.”

Minnesota was a long way from Jacksonville and Tinsley’s parents knew the distance would change things substantially.

“When he left to go up there it was like the first time we was ever going to miss any one of his games, whether it be baseball, football, practice,” his father said. “We was at everything. Then for us not to be able to travel and go up there, to me that was one of the worst times of my life ... we sat around and cried ’cause we wasn’t able to get up there to his games.”

Tinsley played mostly special teams as a freshman and sparingly as a sophomore before he finished the 2009 season strong. He had a career-high 10 tackles and a sack in the regular-season finale, a 12-0 loss to 15th-ranked Iowa. He started all 12 of the Golden Gophers’ games in 2010, recording 90 tackles, although the transition into his senior season was different. The coach who recruited him, Tim Brewster, was fired and Minnesota replaced him with Jerry Kill from Northern Illinois. Tinsley’s father said the change was difficult because of his solid relationship with Brewster, and he had to prove himself again to a new coaching staff.

He did. Tinsley’s 87 tackles were second on the team.

“He had a saying underneath his shirt, ‘Underdog,’ I think Gary always felt like he was the underdog, I think that’s why he achieved so much,” Kill said. “When you come in, you’ve got to prove yourself to the new staff. He worked through whatever he needed to to become our starting linebacker.”

FINAL CONVERSATIONS

Evans and Tinsley were close with their only son.

It wasn’t uncommon for the parents to trade phone calls and text messages with Tinsley at all hours of the day and even well after midnight. Gary Sr. said he had a deep bond with his son, but that Evans and Tinsley talked like they were best friends. And he didn’t hesitate to treat both his mom and dad the same way as he did his friends, often filming them doing embarrassing things without their knowledge and posting the clips on YouTube or Facebook.

One video that Evans has on her computer, a 2-minute, 24-second clip, shows her in her pajamas rifling through Tinsley’s refrigerator. He stood close by, dancing, making faces and mimicking her. Evans said she had no idea what Tinsley had done until she saw the segment on Facebook. Tinsley would sneak away with the wig of his grandmother, Myrtis Evans, and then wake her up with it on his head. He also had plenty of footage of his father snoring.

“But wouldn’t nobody get him, he dumped on all his friends,” Gary Sr. said laughing.

Evans said that the night of April 5 was very fluid.

She called Tinsley around 8 p.m. to ask him some questions about hotels in the area for family who planned on attending his graduation. Tinsley, hanging out with some teammates, couldn’t give specifics, but knew of a hotel where quarterback MarQueis Gray had a party and recommended she look into that one.

“I couldn’t hear him good, I told him to call me back or whatever,” she said. “He never called me back that night.”

Tinsley’s roommate, safety Keanon Cooper, said Tinsley had been watching television in another teammate’s room and was back in his apartment, showering and winding down around “10 [p.m.] something.”

Evans said that former First Coast teammate Royale Smith and Tinsley exchanged text messages around 11 p.m. and talked on the phone hours later, with the last communication around 3:30 a.m.

And then, like every other night, Gary Tinsley put his phone down and went to sleep.

SOMETHING WASN’T RIGHT

Cooper, a four-star recruit at safety out of Skyline High School (Dallas) in 2008, said he and Tinsley just clicked. They’d been roommates for three years in college, a time in which Cooper joked that he could never stop playing defense because of Tinsley.

He was always up to something.

“He got me quite a few times,” Cooper said of being videotaped. “I’d be studying and go to take a break, and I’m singing a song or something ... I can’t sing to save my life, I’m just sitting there reciting the lyrics and I raise my head up and he’s sitting there recording me with his laptop.”

Every morning in their apartment began with the same routine.

Cooper woke up and went into the kitchen to put a bowl of oatmeal on and then into the bathroom to brush his teeth. Across from the bathroom was Tinsley’s room and Cooper could hear his alarm going off. Thinking that Tinsley was just sleeping through it, he went to the door, knocked a few times and still got no response. Cooper knocked louder. Still nothing.

He entered and saw Tinsley lying on the floor on his right side in a pallet made of blankets. It wasn’t anything alarming. Cooper said that their apartment hadn’t been as cool, and that Tinsley had probably just laid down there with a fan buzzing next to him to stay comfortable. He shook Tinsley several times and didn’t get a response. That’s when he knew something wasn’t right.

“I used my right hand [to check]; some of his body was cold some of his body was warm, and I didn’t know quite what to think,” Cooper said. “I didn’t know if his body temperature was dropped because of the fan or what. That’s when it kind of started to hit me, something is definitely up. I called my coaches, called my trainers. They came over and started doing CPR.”

Cooper also called police, who asked him to see if he could get a pulse from Tinsley.

“I flipped my right ear on his chest to hear a heartbeat and I didn’t hear one,” he said. “They [rescue personnel] did CPR on him about four, five minutes maybe, adrenaline shots, doing the whole nine. Unfortunately they couldn’t bring him back.”

Tinsley was pronounced dead at the scene at 8:15 a.m.

Back in Jacksonville, Evans was at her job mid-morning when an email popped into her inbox asking her to call Kill immediately. She knew that Tinsley, just 34 days from graduating, was in Minnesota preparing for the upcoming NFL Draft, so it wasn’t alarming to get a request to call the football coach.

“Coach Kill was like, ‘Ms. Ronda, sorry to tell you this, Coop found Gary in his room unresponsive.’ And I’m like, ‘well is he waking up, where is he, is he at the hospital?’ And he was just like, ‘no, he’s not responding at all.’ I threw my phone and I think I screamed to the top of my lungs and fell out. Then I went into, 'it’s not true; it can’t be true.' I’m calling his phone like, ‘Call me son, you would never go without talking to me first, you know?'”

Tinsley’s funeral on April 14 drew an estimated 1,800 mourners, including the entire Golden Gophers football team. It felt more like a spirited church service than a goodbye.

“He left a great legacy, even in passing, Gary’s made us better,” Kill said. “He brought our team together. It says a lot for Gary when a whole team flies down to Jacksonville for a young man’s funeral. That speaks volumes about the type of person Gary was and still is.”

SYMPTOMS WERE VAGUE

Tinsley never failed a physical. He didn’t have any pre-existing conditions that his family was aware of. With the exception of a couple alcohol-related misdemeanors early in his career, Tinsley had been a model student. Evans said that Tinsley was very cognizant of his body and health and not one to keep any physical symptoms suppressed.

“Gary was the type that told you [if] anything was wrong,” she said. “My pinky hurt, my pinky, it feels numb, he wouldn’t let nothing pass by. So that’s why it’s kind of hard for me to feel that he was in any type of pain.”

Venkata Sagi, a board certified electrophysiologist with Baptist Heart Specialists in Jacksonville, said that a young person dying of cardiomegaly is uncommon. More routinely, people affected by the condition are those who have had heart bypass surgery, are obese or suffer from sleep apnea. But it can also be triggered by something as simple as a common cold and continue to manifest itself, often with little or no warning signs.

“Sometimes we catch them [an enlarged heart] before a passing-out spell in practice, something unusual happens, then we do all testing to diagnose and catch them,” said Sagi, whose specialty is treating rhythm disorders in the heart.

“Sometimes it happens that sudden death is the first symptom that a patient experiences. Patients are completely asymptomatic in most cases. These symptoms are very non-specific. Most of the time, it doesn’t sound like the patient has a heart problem. It’s not uncommon that we miss these patients because their symptoms are so vague.”

Sagi said that a patient’s heart can become enlarged in a very brief period of time — from weeks to a few months.

“Athletes are more prone to die usually in the setting of physical exertion, intense sports, practice ... it is a bit uncommon for them to die during sleep,” he said.

If Tinsley had symptoms, they were so minor he didn’t even notice. The only thing out of the ordinary that Evans recalled was a conversation she had with Tinsley about some weird feelings that he had after working out.

“He did mention probably a couple months ago, ‘like mom, when I work out and when I run I get headaches and my chest hurts,’” Evans said. “I said ‘well, Gary, everything’s there, everything’s free, I say take advantage of it. Go to the doctor, tell them what you’re feeling,' I said ‘let them check you or whatever.’ And I looked from his medical reports that they sent, he did have it checked. But talking to the medical examiner, they would’ve never saw it on a normal X-ray. It would’ve had to be an [echocardiogram] for them to catch it. But that’s the crazy part about it he was getting checked. Of course, I wanted answers; how could you not know about it?”

DIPLOMA AND MEMORIES

Evans keeps a picture of Tinsley in her phone that made the difficult decision of attending Tinsley’s graduation on May 10 manageable.

It’s a self-portrait of Tinsley in a mirror dressed in his cap and gown. With a little smile beginning to form, Tinsley’s sense of accomplishment is unmistakable.

Evans said that it’s one of her favorite pictures of Tinsley because of the pride he had in it. No one in Tinsley’s large family — on his mother’s side, grandmother Myrtis Evans had 12 siblings — had graduated from college. To Tinsley, getting his degree was more important than anything, including the NFL.

Instead of going to West Palm Beach with agent David Weinshel to train for the NFL Draft, Tinsley made the choice to stay in Minnesota and finish a couple classes to earn his degree. Ronda Evans said that not even the chance to bolster his draft stock — Tinsley was a likely free agent signee — swayed him from staying in school. So, Evans and Gary Sr. went, watched and waited to pick up what their son was going for. The crowd gave Tinsley’s mother and father a standing ovation when they walked on stage to pick up his diploma.

It now sits underneath the main window in Evans and Gary Sr’s. living room, resting between two collage frames and a photo of Tinsley from his 2007 prom. There are 18 photos of him in that one room alone. Not far away is a box from Minnesota full of DVDs, press clippings and programs. They’ll stay boxed up.

“The football stuff, I’m not with right now because I know it was his life,” Evans said. “Him being away in Minnesota, that distance and I know he was always gone. To me, it still feels like he’s coming back.”

Freedom is not free, but it is worth fighting for. Thank a Veteran today.

1363 points

CPORetired

Monday, July 2, 2012 @ 5:55 pm

Leviticus, let it rest! This young man was no different than most young college students. He went to Minnesota, and became a college grad, the most important thing in his life! That is the focus of the story, and that is how his family remembers him. Gary set goals for himself, realistic goals that set him apart from most of the athletes in similar situations across this country. Primary in his life was a college degree, and that was so important to him that he was willing to stay in school while preparing for the draft, and accept a walk on position with any team that would offer. To Ms Evans, and Mr. Tinsley SR, you are great parents, and I am so very sorry for your loss. Gary is looking after you now, and you are blessed to have raised such a fine young man.

How sad to lose a child and at such a young age. Atleast he died doing positive in life. Leave it up to T.U to try and throw in a blemish on this young man's memory. You just have to find something negative to say, no matter how good a black person is. Why didn't you post any wrong doings that the white lady done who's husband tried to kill her. Dig up dirt on the principle that was killed. Don't act like whites are saints and blacks are tarnished. The bible says we have All fell short of the glory, so why point out only one side of the not so perfect people.